Lenovo is said to be working on Windows 10 phones, which should launch in China later this year.

The announcement was made late yesterday, in a statement talking about Windows 10 and piracy concerns in the Chinese market.

Reuters reports that Lenovo’s upcoming Windows phones will be available through China Mobile later this year. Details are still sketchy, but we still don’t expect to see Lenovo phones in western markets, which is a pity since the company has a lot of good mid-range devices.

That is not all. Microsoft also announced that it working with Xiaomi to bring Windows to some of its devices. Like Lenovo, Xiaomi is a force to be reckoned with in the Chinese mobile market, which is dominated by domestic brands.

On another note, Lenovo is confident that Windows 10 will help curb piracy in China. The company said it would upgrade “all qualified PCs, genuine and non-genuine, to Windows 10”.

One of the advantages of being named as going under the bonnet of something Applish, is you have your product hyped by the Tame Apple Press, which would otherwise ignore you.

Chipzilla has not had a good time of it in the mobile arena, something it is continually reminded of every time someone mentions smartphones. However on the laptop front, its Core M range is looking very interesting.

Enter Apple

So interesting that Apple has signed it up for its Retina MacBook the company unveiled during its Spring Forward event last week, and it will be released on April 10th.

This caused a problem for the Tame Apple Press which has been spending its time running down Intel mobile processors. However now it seems that the Core M benchmarks show that basically the chip can give anything Apple fanboys threw at it a good kicking.

Oddly, it is one of Apple’s rivals which is showing how good the chip really is. We played with the ultra-slim Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro at an Intel event and it is damn impressive. It can deliver the sort of performance you got from older PC-grade CPUs for next to nothing power draw in a super thin case.

What worries some is that the Intel Core M is that it won’t be able to offer the same sustained performance as other laptops when it comes to activities that require continuous power. In short - it is a little slow for really demanding productivity applications.

However looking at the Yoga for some sustained workloads, yes, the 4.5 watt TDP limited how much performance you are going to get from the CPU. However how often on a laptop is this a problem?

Keeping up with 15W Haswell

In short bursts the new 5Y71 outperformed the Haswell Core i5-4200U from last year’s Yoga 2 Pro.

Our sources tell us that Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro benchmarks were close to last year’s early-2014 13-inch MacBook Air. If Apple does something to improve its OSX to handle a more energy efficient processor it should be a bit better.

The main specs of Lenovo’s slim laptop, including RAM, GPU and storage, also seem to be on par with what the MacBook has to offer: 8GB of DDR3 RAM, Intel HD 5300 graphics card and 256GB/512GB SSD.

Of course it might be just better and cheaper for Apple fanboys to save their cash and buy the Yoga 3 in the first place, but it does mean that Intel is going to suddenly have the Tame Apple Press on its corner cheering for the Core M chip.

Oh, and another thing – while many Core M products are rather expensive, some offer rather good value. The Yoga 3 11.6-incher starts at €599 with 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. Asus Zenbook models start at about €770, but they feature 8GB of RAM and a bigger, 13-inch panel.

While the mobile GTX 980M and GTX 970M GPUs can be seen in plenty of high-end gaming notebooks, Nvidia has now unveiled a couple of new mid-range mobile Maxwell GPUs, the GTX 960M and the GTX 950M.

Unlike other mobile GPU launches we can remember, this is not a paper launch, as Nvidia assures us that we will have a chance to see plenty of design wins, including models from some well known manufacturers like Alienware, Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo, Razer and others.

As far as we can see from Nvidia's official specifications, both the GTX 960M and the GTX 950M are based on the same 28nm GM107 GPU, the same one behind the Geforce GTX 750 Ti desktop graphics card. Both pack 640 CUDA cores, 128-bit memory interface and the same set of features including Battery Boost, GPU Boost 2.0, Optimus and Adaptive VSync.

The GTX 960M will work at a base clock of 1096MHz with a yet to be revealed GPU Boost clock, which will most likely vary depending on the notebook manufacturer, while the GTX 950M works at 914MHz GPU base clock with undertermined GPU Boost clock. The GTX 960M will ship with 2500MHz clocked GDDR5 memory while the GTX 950M will be available with both 2500MHz clocked GDDR5 memory and 1000MHz clocked DDR3 memory.

As noted, both GPUs should be available immediately in a plenty of notebooks including Alienware 13, Acer V Nitro, HP Omen, ASUS G501, Lenovo Y50, Razer's updated Blade Pro notebook and plenty of MSI's notebooks as well.

Nvidia's site also shows the new Geforce 940M and Geforce 930M GPUs, but fails to share any of details, so we guess we will see those at a later date as well.

Lenovo is showing off its first serious moves into making a camera phone.

Dubbed the Vibe Shot which sounds like something you would buy from a sex shop, it appropriately comes with a Lollipop OS.

The phone has a 16-megapixel rear camera and an 8MP front-facing shooter. Other photo-focused features include optical image stabilisation, infrared autofocus, and a tri-color LED flash. Lenovo hopes to launch the Vibe Shot in June starting at $349.

It is not a bad price considering its high-midrange specs. The phone has a Snapdragon 615 processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage plus a MicroSD card slot, and a 5" 1080p screen.

Vibe Shot has a thin 7.3mm profile and manual shutter button making it look like one of the older super-portable point and shoot cameras. A 2900mAh battery is an impressive inclusion, as is Android 5.0 at launch. It is also a Dual-SIM LTE.

Sadly we are unlikely to see it as Lenovo is peddling only Motorola phones in the US and EU which means if you want one you have to go to the Asia Pacific area, which is a bit of a hike.

Lenovo has released three budget friendly A series tablets. The gear which was shown off at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona includes three new Android and Windows flavoured tablets.

The Lenovo Tab 2 A10 and the Lenovo Tab 2 A8 are from the budget-friendly Android A series, while the affordable Lenovo Miix 300 is for those who want Windows.

Like most budget gear coming from China, the Tabs are packed full of features you would have t to sell a kidney for. The Lenovo Tab 2 A10 has a 10.1-inch full HD IPS display for watching movies, but it's also equipped with Dolby Atmos technology and a multi-speaker soundbar to really give you that theatre experience.

It weighs 509 grams and it's about 8.9mm thin. The speaker soundbar is supposed to be pretty good though headphones are still better. It ships with Android 4.4 KitKat (it'll be upgradeable to Lollipop later this year), runs on a quad-core MediaTek processor, has dual-band WiFi and sports an 8-megapixel camera.

Markets outside the US will get an LTE version of the tablet as well. As for the battery life, Lenovo is promising up to 10 hours of charge thanks to the 7,200mAh battery.

The Tab 2 A8, is a smaller A10. It has an 8-inch HD IPS display instead of 10 and is, of course, lighter at 360 grams. The Tab 2 A8 also comes with Dolby Atmos, but it lacks its cousin's more powerful powerful speakers. It has a MediaTek quad-core processor, a microSD card slot that accepts up to 32GB cards, a 5-megapixel rear camera and dual-band WiFi.

The international variant of the Tab 2 A8 comes with a dual-SIM card slot for those who like to hop between carriers and it supports both voice and LTE. Yes, that means you could potentially use the 8-inch A8 as a phone. The A8 is that it ships with a pure version of Android 5.0 Lollipop.

The Miix 300 is intended to be the most budget-friendly Windows tablet (a lower-end version of the Miix 2) from Lenovo yet. It has a decent 300-nit, 8-inch HD IPS display, an Intel Atom quad-core processor, a 5-megapixel rear camera, 64GB of internal storage, a microSD card slot and, of course, WiFi. You also get a free one-year subscription to Microsoft Office 365 as part of the package. It ships with Windows 8.1.

The Tab 2 A10 will be available in pearl white and midnight blue and will ship for $199 starting in April. As for the Tab 2 A8, that comes in pearl white, ebony, midnight blue and neon pink and will be available in June for a starting price of $129. International models with the dual-SIM card slots will cost roughly $179. Finally, the Miix 300 lives up to its affordability promise with a low, low price of $149, which makes it the cheapest Windows tablet in Lenovo's lineup. The Miix 300 will be available in July.

The Lenovo P70 is just an average mid-range phone for the booming Chinese market, but it happens to feature a massive 4000mAh battery.

The Lenovo P70 is a 5-incher, with a 720p IPS panel. Despite the oversized battery, the phone measures 71.8mm x 8.9mm x 142mm and weighs in at 149g, which is not bad, all things considered. The battery is not user replaceable though.

The rest of the package is not bad either – you get a MediaTek MT6752 SoC, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of NAND storage and a microSD slot. The MT6752 features eight Cortex-A53 64-bit cores clocked at up to 1.7GHz, and Mali-T760MP2 graphics capable of hitting 700MHz.

The phone has a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera. Connectivity should not be a problem, as it sports LTE, 802.11n wireless and Bluetooth 4.0. The Lenovo P70 is a dual-SIM device. It's priced at about $220 in China, but don't expect it to go on sale in western markets.

The only problem we could think of is the fact that the phone is available only in ‘Midnight Blue’ – which is a pity, as it could do with a few more colour options.

As we pointed out earlier this week, the Android phone market is becoming increasingly commoditised, so a lot of vendors are trying to find new ways of differentiating their devices. Slapping a huge battery on an affordable mid-range phone is just one way of doing it.

It also makes us wonder – if it’s already possible to create cheap, yet relatively thin phones with oversized batteries, what sort of battery life can we expect on upcoming smartphones, with vastly more efficient FinFET processors?

Leaks from China show that HTC and Samsung may not be the belles of the next Mobile World Congress.

Photos and specs for the Lenovo Vibe Z3 Pro leaked out this week and it looks like Lenovo's new smartphone will be rather nice.

It will feature a 5.5-inch Quad HD display and some powerful hardware under the hood. The Vibe Z3 Pro has a Snapdragon 810 processor, a 3400mAh battery, a 16-megapixel camera with optical image stabilization, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and runs Android 5.0 out of the box.

The Vibe Z3 Pro looks pretty too, with all metal and glass you could want. Rather than copying Apple it seems that Lenovo are more inspired by the recent Xperia handsets, along with some sleek chamfered edges. Lenovo's placed the speaker grills at the bottom of the device and added a three LED flash for its rear camera.

It is a leak so we have no word on price, but Lenovo are good at coming up with good value for money. What is probably more tragic is that we do not know if it will ever turn up in the EU. Lenovo have made a big thing about leaning on their Motorola purchase for European sales.

What do you do if your competitor releases a phone similar to yours for half the price? Do you slash the price, come up with a new phone with a different design or get all your journalist friends to moan that the other company copied you? If you are Apple then you would have selected the third method as the way to deal with Lenovo’s new S90.

The Tame Apple Press rushed out photos of the two phones side by side which “prove” that Lenovo’s S90 is a copy. The only problem is that that the new Lenovo phones look pretty much like the year old phablet my wife owns. We did not notice anyone complaining that the iPhone looked a lot like the Lenovo phablets. If you have a thin smartphone, they are all going to look similar anyway and the difference will be in the ability of Apple to sway a gullible Californian jury.

What appears to have got Apple’s goat is that after entering the phablet market late, it now thinks that it can tell everyone that it was there first. Of course only the Tame Apple press believe it. Apple’s biggest problem is that Lenovo is showing it up. The S90 is a good device with a quad-core Qualcomm processor, 1GB of RAM, 2,300mAh battery, a 13MP rear-facing camera, an 8MP front-facing camera, and ships with Android 4.4.4 KitKat. This one is available exclusively in China (for now, anyway), and retails for about $330 US dollars.

Lenovo has managed to beat analyst forecasts once again, with hefty boost in net income and market share gains.

The PC giant reported a 19% increase in net income in the second fiscal quarter. Lenovo posted a profit of $262 million, up from $219 million in the same quarter last year. Revenue was up 7%, from $9.77 billion to $10.48 billion.

The company gained market share across the board. It now commands a 20% share in the PC market, making it the leading brand in the broader PC and tablet market.

In addition to strong PC sales, Lenovo also reported strong results in mobile. With shipments of 16.9 million units, the company is now the fourth largest smartphone maker in the world.

In a few hours, Lenovo changed the rankings of a phone industry which is dominated by Apple, and Samsung.

However, now it has officially announced that it has completed the acquisition of Motorola Mobility from Google Lenovo becomes clear number three mobile phone manufacturer with 25.6 million sold devices, according to the latest IDG report. Lenovo managed to sell a healthy 16.9 million phones while Motorola sold quite good 8.7 million phones. Most of Motorola phones were Moto G and inexpensive Moto E but making the latest Nexus 6 for Google will definitely boost Lenovo numbers in the fourth quarter.

Motorola is a wholly owned subsidiary with its headquarters in Chicago while the Motorola's 3,500 employees will join the Lenovo. Some 2,800 people who design, engineer, sell and support Motorola’s devices are US based and there is no indication that this is going to change anytime soon. The new logo claims that "Motorola is a Lenovo company" and the head of US Motorola will report to the bosses in Lenovo China.

Lenovo is getting some cool products such as Moto E, Moto G, Moto X and Droid phones as well as quite popular Moto 360 watch. Lenovo expects that it can sell as much as 100 million mobile phone and tablets this year, and the numbers are coming combined from both companies' sales.

There is no surprise that Google remains the owner of most of the patents while Motorola a Lenovo company will receive a license to this rich portfolio of patents and other intellectual property.

Motorola will retain over 2,000 patent assets and a large number of patent cross-license agreements, as well as the Motorola Mobility brand and trademark portfolio.Lenovo paid approximately US$2.91 billion, including approximately US$660 million in cash and 519,107,215 newly issued ordinary shares of Lenovo stock with an aggregate value of US$750 million, representing about 4.7 percent of Lenovo’s shares outstanding, which were transferred to Google.

The remaining US$1.5 billion will be paid to Google by Lenovo in the form of a three-year IOU. A separate cash compensation of approximately US$228 million was paid by Lenovo to Google primarily for the cash and working capital held by Motorola.

Google paid $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility back in 2011 and considering that it sold the company for $2.91 billion, one can see this as a huge loss. It was all about the patent portfolio that Google was after patents. The company had 17,000 patents, with 7,500 more patents pending and this put Apple in a bad position in a potential lawsuit against Google over the android patent infringements of iOS. Motorola managed to sell its cable modem and set top box group to Arris group in December 2012 for $2.35 billion making some of the 12.5 billion USD back.

Lenovo has many great brands and designs including legendary ThinkPad and the company likes to experiment with Ashton Kutcher and weird shaped tablets. Motorola is strong brand in phones and it will definitely increase Lenovo presence in the US, one of the main Motorola's markets.

We will see if Lenovo can put Apple and Samsung in jeopardy becoming the number 2 or even number 1 phone manufacturer when it comes to the volume.